‘How I Met Your Mother’ – ‘Unfinished’: Where’s the poop?

A quick review of last night’s “How I Met Your Mother” coming up just as soon as my hairstyle is co-opted by the lesbian community…

After two uneven but mostly promising episodes, team “HIMYM” gave us an absolute dud last night with “Unfinished.” It didn’t work on an emotional level, in large part because it expected us to care about Don, when everyone in the audience would have been fine with never hearing about the guy again. And it didn’t work on a comic level. Lily’s “Where’s the poop?” was one of the show’s weirder and more forced attempts to coin a catchphrase, Marshall’s funk band seemed a random continuity insert, “Clerks” should have retired all jokes about the contractors on the Death Star, etc.

In the summer, Bays and Thomas talked about how this season would have a lot of big story arcs, and “Unfinished” did set up one of them in putting Ted in charge of the new GNB building. (Though it did it by having him walk out of the middle of a class, which fit the romantic comedy parody they were going for, but made Ted look like a dick.) So now that we have a lot of things set up, hopefully things will get interesting. Sitcoms have bad episodes. It happens. But after last season, “HIMYM” can’t afford to have too many of them, especially early.